A small Django app that provides template tags for using Markdown using the python-markdown2 library.

What's with the "deux" in the name?

The obvious name for this project is django-markdown2. However, there already is one! and name confusion doesn't help anybody. Plus, I took French immersion in school for 12 years: might as well put it to use.

So why another project then?

Because I wanted to do something slightly different. Django-markdown2's markdown filter takes "extras" as arguments -- with the one exception that "safe" is transformed to python-markdown2's safe_mode argument. This is handy for quick usage. My use case is more commonly: lots of markdown filter and block usage in my Django templates with the same set of python-markdown2 options.

Installation

Choose the one of the following that works best for you:

• Install the latest release from PyPI:

  pip install django-markdown-deux

  or, if you use ActivePython:

  pypm install django-markdown-deux

  These should install the dependent python-markdown2 package.

• Get a git clone of the source tree:

  git clone git://github.com/trentm/django-markdown-deux.git

  You might want a particular tag:

  cd django-markdown-deux
  git tag -l   # list available tags
  git checkout $tagname

  Then you'll need the "lib" subdir on your PYTHONPATH:

  python setup.py install # or 'export PYTHONPATH=`pwd`/lib:$PYTHONPATH'

  You'll also need the python-markdown2 library:

  git clone git@github.com:trentm/python-markdown2.git
  cd python-markdown2
  python setup.py install   # or 'export PYTHONPATH=`pwd`/python-markdown2/lib'

Django project setup

1. Add markdown_deux to INSTALLED_APPS in your project's "settings.py".

2. Optionally set some of the MARKDOWN_DEUX_* settings. See the "Settings" section below.

Usage

The markdown_deux facilities typically take an optional "style" argument. This is a name for a set of options to the python-markdown2 processor. There is a "default" style that is used if no argument is given. See the MARKDOWN_DEUX_STYLES setting below for more.

markdown template filter

{% load markdown_deux_tags %}
...
{{ myvar|markdown:"STYLE" }}      {# convert `myvar` to HTML using the "STYLE" style #}
{{ myvar|markdown }}              {# same as `{{ myvar|markdown:"default"}}` #}

markdown template block tag

{% load markdown_deux_tags %}
...
{% markdown STYLE %}        {# can omit "STYLE" to use the "default" style #}
This is some **cool**
[Markdown](http://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/)
text here.
{% endmarkdown %}

markdown_allowed template tag

In a template:

{% markdown_allowed %}

will emit a short HTML blurb that says Markdown syntax is allowed. This can be handy for placing under form elements that accept markdown syntax. You can also use it as the help_text for a form field something like:

# myapp/forms.py
from markdown_deux.templatetags.markdown_deux_tags import markdown_allowed
class MyForm(forms.Form):
    #...
    description = forms.CharField(
        label="Description (required)",
        widget=forms.Textarea(attrs={"rows": 5}),
        help_text=_secondary_span("A brief description of your thing.<br/> "
            + markdown_allowed()),
        required=True)

markdown_cheatsheet tag

{% markdown_cheatsheet %}

This outputs HTML giving a narrow (appropriate for, e.g., a sidebar) listing of some of the more common Markdown features.

markdown_deux.markdown(TEXT, STYLE) in your Python code

The markdown filter and block tags above ultimately use this markdown_deux.markdown(...) function. You might find it useful to do Markdown processing in your Python code (e.g. in a view, in a model .save() method).

Settings

All settings for this app are optional.

MARKDOWN_DEUX_STYLES setting

A mapping of style name to a dict of keyword arguments for python-markdown2's markdown2.markdown(text, **kwargs). For example the default setting is effectively:

MARKDOWN_DEUX_STYLES = {
    "default": {
        "extras": {
            "code-friendly": None,
        },
        "safe_mode": "escape",
    },
}

I.e. only the "default" style is defined and it just uses the code-friendly extra and escapes raw HTML in the given Markdown (for safety).

Here is how you might add styles of your own, and preserve the default style:

# settings.py
from markdown_deux.conf.settings import MARKDOWN_DEUX_DEFAULT_STYLE

MARKDOWN_DEUX_STYLES = {
    "default": MARKDOWN_DEUX_DEFAULT_STYLE,
    "trusted": {
        "extras": {
            "code-friendly": None,
        },
        # Allow raw HTML (WARNING: don't use this for user-generated
        # Markdown for your site!).
        "safe_mode": False,
    },
    # Here is what http://code.activestate.com/recipes/ currently uses.
    "recipe": {
        "extras": {
            "code-friendly": None,
        },
        "safe_mode": "escape",
        "link_patterns": [
            # Transform "Recipe 123" in a link.
            (re.compile(r"recipe\s+#?(\d+)\b", re.I),
             r"http://code.activestate.com/recipes/\1/"),
        ],
        "extras": {
            "code-friendly": None,
            "pyshell": None,
            "demote-headers": 3,
            "link-patterns": None,
            # `class` attribute put on `pre` tags to enable using
            # <http://code.google.com/p/google-code-prettify/> for syntax
            # highlighting.
            "html-classes": {"pre": "prettyprint"},
            "cuddled-lists": None,
            "footnotes": None,
            "header-ids": None,
        },
        "safe_mode": "escape",
    }
}

MARKDOWN_DEUX_HELP_URL setting

A URL for to which to link for full markdown syntax default. This link is only in the output of the markdown_allowed and markdown_cheatsheet template tags.

The default is http://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/syntax, the canonical Markdown syntax reference. However, if your site uses Markdown with specific tweaks, you may prefer to have your own override. For example, ActiveState Code uses:

MARKDOWN_DEUX_HELP_URL = "/help/markdown/"

To link to its own Markdown syntax notes URL.